"Each generation, coming out of obscurity, must define its mission and fulfill or betray it." Frantz Fanon - The Wretched of the Earth James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership. {r}evolution

Our mission is to nurture the transformational leadership capacities of individuals and organizations committed to creating productive, sustainable, ecologically responsible, and just communities. Through local, national and international networks of activists, artists and intellectuals we foster new ways of living, being and thinking to face the challenges of the 21st century.

Are Bigger Rallies What We Need?

LIVING FOR CHANGE Are Bigger Rallies What We Need?
By Grace Lee BoggsMichigan Citizen, Oct 24, 2009

Bill McKibben has written countless articles and books about the climate crisis. He also walks his talk.

In April 2007 he organized the Step It Up National Day of Climate Action, calling for real leadership by our elected officials to address the environmental crisis. It was one of the largest global warming protests ever held in the U.S.A.

Recently he co-founded www.350.org, an international grassroots campaign to warn people all over the world that 350 parts per million carbon dioxide is the most we can safely have in the atmosphere. We are already at 390 ppm and rising.

Now he has called upon people the world over to organize “thousands of rallies and events and demonstrations to demand that our leaders take tougher action heading to Copenhagen” and make Saturday, October 24, “the biggest day of action on climate change the world has ever seen.”

In a recent Huffington Post article, McKibben reports that he has reached people in every corner of the earth, and “they’ve responded with an unbelievable outpouring of art, of music, of commitment. There are big actions organized for almost every city on earth on the 24th, including 120 in China, at least that number in India–and even in tough places like Kabul, like the Sudan, like Iraq. Iranian organizers have set up a Farsi website to coordinate their demonstrations–on and on.”

McKibben’s energy and enthusiasm are contagious. But they also raise the question whether more and bigger rallies are the best way to grapple with what Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the fierce urgency of now.”

On February 15, 2003 ten million people in 600 cities all over the world demonstrated to stop the United States from going to war in Iraq. The next month the U. S. invaded Iraq, and eight years after 911 we are still mired in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Countless demonstrations by union members, nurses and physicians have not succeeded in forcing the White House and Congress to include single payer in their proposals for health care reform.

The reality we can no longer evade is that the White House and Congress have become so beholden to the Pentagon and corporate lobbyists that they now embody their values of Militarism and Materialism, values that are not only socially and ecologically unsustainable but suicidal. They represent an industrial civilization in collapse.

So it is futile to keep organizing ever-bigger demonstrations trying to force these dinosaurs to take tougher action on climate change and/or devise non-military solutions to foreign policy issues.

We ourselves must become the change we want to see in the world.

That is why the small groups coming together to plant community gardens, organize community security clubs, share tools, create local currencies, barter goods and services are so significant.

From a Newtonian perspective these local efforts may seem too small to matter. But, as Margaret Wheatley points out in Leadership and Modern Science, “a quantum view explains the success of small efforts quite differently.”

“Acting locally allows us to be inside the movement and flow of the system, participating in all those complex events occurring simultaneously. Changes in small places also affect the global system, not through incrementalism, but because every small system participates in an unbroken wholeness. We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness.”

We can learn a lot from Ardipithecus whose reconstituted remains, scientists tell us, are evidence of our first human ancestor who evolved 4.5 million years ago.

Ardis did not appear all at once, en masse, like a school of fish. In the beginning there may have been only one or a few Ardis. But these few survived, multiplied and evolved through natural selection and/or “critical connections.”

ON Being Krista Tippet

ON Being Krista Tippet
January 19, 2012
We travel to Detroit to meet the civil rights legend Grace Lee Boggs. We find the 96-year-old philosopher surrounded by creative, joyful people and projects that defy more familiar images of decline. It's a kind of parallel urban universe with much to teach all of us about meeting the changes of our time.
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Boggs Center 3061 Field St. Detroit, MI 48214

James and Grace Lee boggs Center To Nurture community Leadership
hpp//www.boggscenter.org / {r}evolution - the two side non-violent revolution in values.
The Boggs Center was founded in 1995 by friends and associates of James Boggs (1919 -1993) and Grace Lee Boggs (1915 - ) to honor and continue their legacy as movement activists and theoreticians.
Our aim is to help grassroots activists develop themselves into visionary leaders and critical thinkers who can devise proactive strategies for rebuilding and respiriting our cities and rural communities from the ground up, demonstrate the power of ideas in changing ourselves, our reality, and demystify leadership.